Journalism Becomes a Crime in Egypt

When Montaser Marai, a senior producer for Al Jazeera, covered the Egyptian uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak, in early 2011, he hid in an empty apartment above Tahrir Square and stole naps on a cot in the protesters’ field hospital. Fearful that he might be arrested by the police or the military at any moment, he didn’t leave the square for nearly two weeks, until the day Mubarak stepped down. A camera that he set up to gaze down on Tahrir from the apartment provided overhead shots of the revolution that were seen by millions of people around the world. Those weeks exhausted Marai, but they were exhilarating. When I met him one afternoon that month, near a large sheet in Tahrir onto which television images—many of them from his camera—were being projected, he looked haggard, but he grinned mischievously as he pointed in the direction of the room where he’d stashed his gear.

Three years on, the situation for journalists in Egypt has grown so dire that Marai, now based in Doha, won’t even risk travelling there. The new military-led regime has subjected journalists to months of passive-aggressive treatment (obtaining press credentials has become a bureaucratic nightmare) and a few episodes of outright aggression (arresting several reporters on trumped-up charges, including support for terrorism). On Wednesday, the government opened a new front in its crackdown on the press, announcing that it would formally bring twenty journalists to trial. All of the accused are employees of Al Jazeera, a network that made no secret of its sympathy for the revolution and for the Muslim Brotherhood. But four of the accused are foreigners, with résumés that include work at places like CNN and the BBC. For Marai, who hasn’t been back to Egypt since the military came to power, in July, the message is clear: stay away. “It’s gone crazy,” he told me by phone this week from Doha, where he now works as a consultant and instructor for Al Jazeera. “At this point, people are hoping it only goes back to the way it was during the Mubarak era, and not worse.”

Six months after the military overthrew the country’s first democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi—in what the military called a “restoration” of democracy—all of Egyptian society appears to have been upended. The Brotherhood, which breezed into power two years ago, today stands disenfranchised and incapacitated, its members scattered or arrested; in December, the government declared it a terrorist organization. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Army boss who led last July’s coup, seems poised to run for President, cementing the formal restoration of the military as Egypt’s preëminent authority.

Meanwhile, fear of Islamist extremism, and antipathy toward dissent, has spread so widely that anyone who bothered to campaign against the referendum on the military-led government’s constitution risked arrest and beating; merely expressing sympathy for the Brotherhood is now enough to earn a visit from the police. Last fall, security forces detained a stork that had been fitted with a tracking device, suspecting that it was involved in spying. In December, a popular television hand puppet was investigated on suspicion of sending coded messages in support of radicals during a television commercial for mobile-phone service.

For foreign journalists, who were tolerated under the Brotherhood but have never been viewed with great affection in Cairo, the steep decline in working conditions hit bottom in December, when the police busted down the door of an upscale hotel suite that served as the offices for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel and dragged away the staff. The detained reporters, including the Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, and Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent, were swiftly dubbed “the Marriott terror cell”—a moniker adopted by both the state and private media, which have overwhelmingly supported the military since Morsi’s overthrow. The sweeping litany of charges against the Al Jazeera employees—“disturbing public peace, instilling terror, harming the general interests of the country, possessing broadcast equipment without permit, possessing and disseminating images contrary to the truth”—leave the impression that just about any act of journalism, particularly if it involves speaking to members of the Brotherhood, could be considered a crime.

The government’s suppressive tactics have been given vital support by the overwhelming complicity of the public, which has enthusiastically embraced even the most absurd claims about the foreign media. When an explosion went off outside Cairo’s police headquarters last Friday, foreign reporters were pushed away from the scene by hostile crowds, who threatened to beat journalists and steal their equipment. When crowds gathered the next day to mark the third anniversary of the start of the revolution, Egyptian journalists warned their foreign colleagues to stay home for their own safety: “If you absolutely must go downtown today,” one tweeted on Saturday, “put your cameras & notebooks away and keep moving.” More than a dozen foreign reporters were assaulted or detained over the weekend.

For Marai, and for many journalists now working in Egypt, this public outrage is even scarier than the government’s crackdown, and a far worse omen for Egypt’s future. “You watch what happens with the Sisi supporters,” he said. “They will take someone who they don’t like and hand him over to the police.” The Egyptian government seems to have realized, belatedly, that criminalizing the work of journalists—and exposing them to public vigilantism—antagonizes not only the entire foreign press corps but also their countries of origin. On Friday, the state media office released a statement seeking to reassure journalists that “constructive criticism” would not be criminalized. But it also warned them that freedom of “thought and opinion” is not protected under Egyptian law, and that some forms of contact with the Brotherhood might still be criminal, “if this contact is a sort of assisting or inciting.”

Needless to say, it failed to assuage the concerns of most reporters in the country. “Thinking is ok,” one British journalist quipped on Twitter, “as long as your thoughts are in line with a set of rules we make up as we go along.”